'Of course; but you can't pay it at present, and it may be highly important to enable you to treat this as a debt of honour, you perceive. Suppose, my dear Sir, they should proceed to arrest you, or to sequestrate the revenue of your vicarage. Now, see, my dear Sir, I am, I humbly hope, a Christian man; but you will meet with men in every profession--and mine is no exception--disposed to extract the last farthing which the law by its extremest process will give them. And I really must tell you, frankly, that if you dream of escaping the most serious consequences, you must at once place yourself and your affairs in the hands of a competent man of business. It will probably be found that you do not in reality owe sixty pounds of every hundred claimed against you.' 'Oh, Mr. Larkin, if I could induce _you_.' Mr. Larkin smiled a melancholy smile, and shook his head. 'My dear Sir, I only wish I could; but my hands are so awfully full,' and he lifted them up and shook them, and shook his tall, bald head at the same time, and smiled a weary smile. 'Just look there,' and he waved his fingers in the direction of the Cyclopean wall of tin boxes, tier above tier, each bearing, in yellow italics, the name of some country gentleman, and two baronets among the number; 'everyone of them laden with deeds and papers. You can't have a notion--no one has--what it is.' 'I see, indeed,' murmured the honest vicar, in a compassionating tone, and quite entering into the spirit of Mr. Larkin's mournful appeal, as if the being in large business was the most distressing situation in which an attorney could well find himself. 'It was very unreasonable of me to think of troubling you with my wretched affairs; but really I do not know very well where to turn, or whom to speak to. Maybe, my dear Sir, you can think of some conscientious and Christian practitioner who is not so laden with other people's cares and troubles as you are. I am a very poor client, and indeed more trouble than I could possibly be gain to anyone. But there may be some one; pray think; ten days is so short a time, and I can do nothing.' Mr. Larkin stood at the window ruminating, with his left hand in his breeches pocket, and his right, with finger and thumb pinching his under lip, after his wont, and the despairing accents of the poor vicar's last sentence still in his ear.